The Rogue Waveform

What if science could make you lovable? That's the wild premise at the heart of this 1955 sci-fi oddity. Freddy Booten knows exactly what the world thinks of him. As professional wrestler Don Diablo, he's cultivated his image as a figure of contempt, a man the audience loves to hate. Then a brilliant scientist named Panda enters his life with an extraordinary proposition: Freddy possesses something called a "rogue symbiotic waveform," and she wants to study it at the Keevan Research Foundation. The experiment that follows is stranger still. After undergoing a controversial procedure meant to reshape his personality, Freddy awakens to find the impossible has happened. He's become lovable. The wrestling audience adores him. His pigs adore him. Even his enemies can't bring themselves to hate him. But as the man who built a career on being despised discovers what it means to be universally beloved, he must confront an unsettling question: who is he without his hatred? Stockheker's novel is a sharp, funny meditation on identity and the stories we tell about ourselves, wrapped in the unlikely package of wrestling culture and bio-electronic experimentation.